Caltech Researchers Find Wind-turbine Placement Produces 10-fold Power Increase

Attribution:
- Design & Production: Caltech Academic Media Technologies
- Fish Illustration: Roberto Osti
- Photos: Caltech Office of Marketing and Communications, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Verity Smith
- Royalty free music licensed by www.stockmusic.net

Read the press release of Professor John O. Dabiri's research at http://media.caltech.edu/press_releas...

© 2011 California Institute of Technology

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Norris Brock]

Can't wait for the new 2.4kwh comes out !!!

[iggybun]

Sorry, I meant to write (1/3)rps not 3rps

[iggybun]

Let's face it wind energy is currently useless east of the Mississippi. Yet some politicians and "Green" organizations that have accumulated political power especially during the last 10 years waste money on HAWT for show purposes only. Here in Rhode Island we have such groups and the the generators break down wiping out any initial savings. Plus the taxes paid to Save the Bay were wasted to build 3 large ugly HAWT that barely rotate at 3rps on a windy day and will be shut down at high winds.

[electrodacus]

They do not say that VAWT are 10x more efficient than HAVT. They only say you can fit more of them on the same piece of land so you can have 10x higher density.

But even what thy say is not true unless there are very particular condition on that building site. Most large wind turbine sites have wind predominately from one direction and their calculation do not apply there.

The fish example is also bad since they try to do quite the opposite from a wind turbine.

[electrodacus]

The wind turbine in this videos are Darrieus type that have a peak efficiency of 5 to 10% lower than the horizontal blade type turbines you can find more info on google.

The efficiency on a wind turbine is represented by the amount of power extracted from the wind. The Darrieus type will need more materials for the same area (height x diameter) compared to area of the sweep circle on a horizontal blade type so the first will be more expensive.

[iggybun]

State your source or are you making it up?

[hanni6022]

John dabiri are you single

[electrodacus]

VAWT are not more efficient and they are also not more cost effective than HAWT.

[Christopher Miller]

2:13: "We designed these wind turbine farms in a way that the wind direction actually doesn't matter. This is important for wind farm sites where the winds can change from the Santa Anas coming from one direction to the typical prevailing winds from the west."

[illegalsmilereturns]

Neat. I have never seen vertical turbines. Very cool, please keep up the good work, all of humanity depends on it. I hope you have many lucky days, you deserve it. Cheers.